When a Republican presidential candidate goes around talking about Barack Obama as the "food stamp president," eventually reporters are going to have to write about racism. But how they talk about the issue in instructive. In today's New York Times (1/18/12), Jim Rutenberg has a piece headlined "Risks for GOP in Attacks With Racial Themes," where we learn this about Newt Gingrich's food stamp rhetoric:

Mr. Gingrich was clearly making the case that he is the candidate most able to take the fight to Mr. Obama in the fall, but he was also laying bare risks for his party when it comes to invoking arguments perceived to carry racial themes or other value-laden attack lines.

This is the kind of language one expects to encounter when reporters have to figure out ways to talk about racism without calling it racism. In Monday's Times (1/16/12--Martin Luther King Jr. Day),  John Harwood reported on why several Republicans didn't pursue the presidential nomination:

Political heavyweights who declined to enter the 2012 race all had uniquely personal reasons. Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana faced family resistance; former Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi feared being bogged down in the politics of race; Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey doubted his readiness for the Oval Office.

People who remember the Barbour story might not recall anything about a bog. Barbour talked to the Weekly Standard in late 2010, and he professed fond memories of the white supremacist Citizens Council groups in Mississippi. In Barbour's mind they were anti-Klan activists, which as critics pointed out, is a rather remarkable description of groups that were founded to oppose school integration and protest civil rights advocates.

That controversy brought up other unpleasant Barbour stories, like this anecdote from a 1982 New York Times article (dug up by Ben Smith at Politico) about Barbour's Congressional campaign:

But the racial sensitivity at Barbour headquarters was suggested by an exchange between the candidate and an aide who complained that there would be "coons" at a campaign stop at the state fair. Embarrassed that a reporter heard this, Mr. Barbour warned that if the aide persisted in racist remarks, he would be reincarnated as a watermelon and placed at the mercy of blacks.

That the obvious racism on display is characterized as "racial sensitivity" suggests the Times hasn't changed a whole lot over the years.

One point that Rutenberg's piece today makes is that the pointed questions that were posed to Gingrich at the recent debate were asked by a black reporter: Fox's Juan Williams.  To Williams, there's nothing subtle about what Gingrich is doing here; it is  "more than a dog whistle.... It's a hoot and a holler."

It could be that journalists of color would be more likely to call out a candidate making these kinds of appeals.  That's less likely when there are few journalists of color covering the campaign. To take just one outlet as an example, Richard Prince recently noted in his Journal-isms column (1/4/12) that Time magazine does not have any blacks or Latinos covering the 2012 political season.

There are two ways to approach being evenhanded: You can try to actually be evenhanded, which could mean that you find that one side is right and the other is wrong. Or you can strive for the appearance of being evenhanded, which means that you decide in advance that you're going to find that there's truth on both sides.

PolitiFact, a political factchecking project based in St. Petersburg, Florida, has been criticized for taking the latter approach. An item it posted yesterday (1/9/12) is further evidence of its preference for the appearance of evenhandedness over its reality.

The item addressed Rick Santorum's assertion in a January 4 town meeting that as a result of the 1996 welfare law, "Poverty levels went down to the lowest level ever for...one of the areas that had the highest level of poverty historically, which is African-American children." PolitiFact concluded that the statement was "Half True," since "Santorum is right that poverty rates declined after the reform’s passage. But opinions differ on the primary cause."

As evidence that "opinions differ," the factcheckers turned to Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, best known for his argument that the poor aren't really poor because they have microwave ovens and the like. Unsurprisingly, since he works for a group set up explicitly to promote conservative ideas, he does indeed have the opinion that the 1996 welfare law caused a drop in child poverty. But does this opinion have any basis in fact?

PolitiFact allows him to make his case at length, but the gist of it is this: "Since welfare reform, the poverty rate among black children has fallen at an unprecedented rate from 41.5 percent in 1995 to 32.9 percent in 2004." And PolitiFact helpfully gives you a link to a U.S. Census chart that shows that those numbers are almost accurate. But looking at the numbers for yourself, you see that there's no indication that the 1996 law had anything to do with them: Poverty among black children peaked in 1992, at 46.3 percent, and declined steadily from then until 2001, when it hit a low of 30.0 before moving upward.  1996 does not seem to have impacted the poverty trajectory at all; a naive reading of the numbers would indicate that black child poverty goes up when someone named "Bush" is in the White House.

Here's a graph of child poverty by race from Mother Jones (9/29/11--by raw numbers, not percentages) that illustrates the utter unremarkability of 1996 for black child poverty:

PolitiFact goes on to give equal space, and equal rhetorical weight, to sources who say economic growth is actually what drove child poverty down in the '90s: "While Rector maintains that the economy played only a secondary role in reducing poverty, other groups says it’s the main driver." But none of these sources directly rebut Rector's arguments, or point out how dubious it is to give a 1996 law credit for a decline that began four years earlier.

So it's true that "opinions differ" on whether the 1996 welfare lowered poverty for black children. A real factchecker would point out that the advocate for that opinion offers selective and misleading figures to back it up. But then, if you did point that out, you might look like you weren't being evenhanded.

(Thanks to Neil deMause for bringing PolitiFact's report to my attention.)

Is Fox News Channel going soft? In an election year? Some media figures seem to think the hard-right channel is going to the "middle," but this seems to be a figment of the centrist imagination.

New York magazine's Gabriel Sherman has a short piece trying to make this case. His first bit of evidence is that  Fox granted backstage access at its recent Republican debate to a New York Times reporter--as Sherman put it, "Fox's decision to allow Times scribe Jim Rutenberg into the building to confront the candidates in person." That sounds rather aggressive, and Sherman sees this as some sort of political shift:

That "sweating" session was a debate moderated by three Republican attorneys general, who are in some ways to the right of some of the candidates--particularly Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. Given that the conservative base of the Republican party seems to have questions about the ideological commitment of these two--especially Romney--the fact that Fox convened a debate where the candidates had to field questions from the right doesn't really seem like playing to the "center."

Sherman argues:

Jesse Jackson had some tough criticism for the Tea Party movement at a Martin Luther King event on Thursday. USA Today's Melanie Eversley  covered his remarks, getting a Tea Party activist to respond to his criticism. The piece then added this, presumably in order to add some context:

The group has faced criticism of being a racist group, a claim made most visibly by former National Public Radio fundraiser Ron Schiller, who was caught on hidden camera calling the group racist and xenophobic, prompting his immediate resignation.

In other words, lots of people seem to hurl accusations of racism at the Tea Party, right? One tiny problem: Schiller didn't actually say that--he said that was what some Republicans were saying about the Tea Party. NPR's David Folkenflik (among others) pointed out that the video--released by right-wing hoaxer James O'Keefe--was edited in order to make a totally misleading impression:

in the shorter tape, Schiller is also presented as saying the GOP has been "hijacked" by Tea Partyers and xenophobes.

In the longer tape, it's evident Schiller is not giving his own views but instead quoting two influential Republicans--one an ambassador, another a senior Republican donor. Schiller notably does not take issue with their conclusions--but they are not his own.

This is the problem with the O'Keefe/Andrew Breitbart school of right-wing advocacy. Their work can't be trusted, and some people usually manage to figure out where they've cut a corner or edited a tape in order to advance a bogus storyline. But too many reporters remember the initial bogus story as fact--ACORN workers helped a "pimp" set up a brothel, for example--which is precisely the point of this propaganda.

Today's New York Times has a story by David Kirkpatrick and Rod Norland running down the exaggerations and misinformation that have been spread throughout the Libya War. There's been "spin from all sides," they report. Gadhafi's exaggerations are well-known, but this passage is rather striking:

Still, the rebels have offered their own far-fetched claims, like mass rapes by loyalist troops issued tablets of Viagra. Although the rebels have not offered credible proof, that claim is nonetheless the basis of an investigation by the International Criminal Court.

And there is the mantra, with racist overtones, that the Gadhafi government is using African mercenaries, which rebels repeat as fact over and over. There have been no confirmed cases of that; supposedly there are many African prisoners of war being held in Benghazi, but conveniently journalists are not allowed to see them. There are, however, African guest workers, poorly paid migrant labor, many of whom, unarmed, have been labeled mercenaries.

So stories about African mercenaries are a racist mantra? If that's the case,  then point a finger at media outlets like the New York Times. While the warnings about mass rapes and mercenaries  fueled the supporters of the NATO bombing,  few reporters have detailed--mostly notably Patrick Cockburn in the Independent--that there was never solid evidence to support them.  They were nonetheless a regular part of the media coverage of the war, as I pointed out in a recent piece in Extra!:

A February 24 Washington Post editorial thundered, "Mr. Gadhafi has unleashed an orgy of bloodshed in the capital, Tripoli, using foreign mercenaries and aircraft to attack his own people." The day before, the New York Times editorial page (2/23/11) announced that in Tripoli "pro-government forces, relying heavily on mercenaries, were massacring demonstrators." The Times added that "there were reports of warplanes and helicopters being used to attack civilians"--though the paper did note that "authoritative information was difficult to come by."

"Gadhafi's brutal side has emerged once again," reported ABC's Martha Raddatz (World News, 2/22/11). "This time, flying in cargo planes full of African mercenaries, who don’t even speak the language, to do his dirty work. Trained killers gunning down residents and protesters in cold blood."

And those "racist overtones" were fairly common in the pages of the New York Times. From February 22:

By Monday night, witnesses said, the streets of Tripoli were thick with special forces loyal to Colonel Gadhafi as well as mercenaries. Roving the streets in trucks, they shot freely as planes dropped what witnesses described as ''small bombs'' and helicopters fired on protesters....

Two residents said planes had been landing for 10 days ferrying mercenaries from African countries to an air base in Tripoli. The mercenaries had done much of the shooting, which began Sunday night, they said. Some forces were using particularly lethal, hollow-point bullets, they said.

February 23:

Witnesses said groups of heavily armed militiamen and mercenaries from other African countries cruised the streets in pickup trucks, spraying crowds with machine-gun fire.

February 24:

Distrustful of even his own generals, Colonel Gadhafi has for years quietly built up this ruthless and loyal force. It is made up of special brigades headed by his sons, segments of the military loyal to his native tribe and its allies, and legions of African mercenaries he has helped train and equip. Many are believed to have fought elsewhere, in places like Sudan, but he has now called them back.

It's worth noting that David Kirkpatrick, co-author of today's piece, also co-authored all of the articles excerpted above.

One has to wonder if the Times is changing the story now because they believe the war is over. What better time to start exercising skepticism than now?

USA Today published a useful investigation today (7/15/11) finding that "rates of violent crime along the U.S./Mexico border have been falling for years," that  U.S. border cities are "statistically safer on average than other cities in their states" and "border cities, big and small, have maintained lower crime rates than the national average, which itself has been falling."

The USA Today report is not the first to dispel what it calls the "bloody"  picture of the U.S. border with Mexico. But while it cites politicians, including Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, for spreading the myth, the piece lets right-wing media, including national pundits like Bill O'Reilly, off the hook. (As FAIR has repeatedly noted, O'Reilly has been  a key propagandist pushing the border violence lie.)

But mainstream corporate outlets have done their share, too. As I pointed out in April's Extra! ("Worthy and Unworthy Border Murders"), so-called mainstream reporters frequently embrace the narrative that unauthorized immigration poses a grave threat to the nation.

The headline in today's New York Times (7/13/11):

Plenty of Action Before the Game, but No Immigration Law Protests

The Paper of Record reported that the much-discussed protests against Arizona's SB 1070 law fizzled:

In the end, commerce trumped conscience. It was no mystery why the fervor over the immigration law was as flat as a half-full can of soda left in the 100-degree heat.

Meanwhile, back in reality (Think Progress, 7/13/11):

As we pointed out here and Monica Novoa pointed out here, Jose Antonio Vargas came out in the pages of the New York Times Magazine as an undocumented immigrant. In that piece and in some follow-ups, he seems to be aware of the distinction between "undocumented" and "illegal." His Times piece was headlined, "My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant." That is the term he used in the article.

It is completely inexplicable, then, that the magazine chose this headline for the Vargas letters this weekend:

I, Illegal Immigrant

Reporter Jose Antonio Vargas wrote a moving piece for the New York Times magazine about his status as an undocumented immigrant. One hope is that his story might improve the tone and substance of media coverage of immigration; Vargas has suggested as much, at one point tweeting this message:

Undocumented Immigrant trending. So let's drop "Illegal" and "Alien." No person is illegal or an alien.

His story has received a tremendous amount of media attention. But as Monica Novoa pointed out at ColorLines, too much coverage has dwelt on Vargas' "illegal" status:

Vargas’ story has drawn enormous media attention and drove "undocumented immigrant" up to a top-trending term on Twitter yesterday. But it’s a shame that in the dissection and retelling of his story, a fine point has been lost on many of Vargas’ colleagues: He came out specifically as an undocumented immigrant and not as “illegal.” The distinction is a central part of his story. He is rejecting a legally inaccurate, dehumanizing and racist label that helps to prop up an ignorant and limited immigration debate, along with all of the violence and unconstitutionality the concept of an “illegal” human being engenders.

That brings us to his Sunday appearance on ABC's This Week.  Check out their headline:

Last week, Washington Post reporter Dan Balz explained that Newt Gingrich was "an idea-spewing machine" and a "one-man think tank"--even warning that "a keen intellect can also translate into the appearance of intellectual superiority." Well OK.

A few days in Balz's paper, readers learned that in a recent speech Gingrich called Barack Obama a "food stamp president." Which I think must be some wonky think tank rhetoric.

Matthew Yglesias also noted that in the same appearance, Gingrich advocated a return to Jim Crow-era voting laws, saying: "But maybe we should also have a voting standard that says to vote, as a native born American, you should have to learn American history."

Well, he's definitely spewing something.

Newsweek's cover story this week is on the plight of college-educated white men aged 35-64. The magazine laments that "this hitherto privileged demo isn't just on its knees, it's flat on on its face." The subhead of the piece asks, "Can manhood survive the lost decade?"

Now, I have much sympathy for all who are struggling with unemployment. But are middle-aged, college-educated white males flat on their face and worthy of a trend cover story? It's hard to square that with the piece's own admission that their jobless rate is just above 5 percent. Most demographic groups would give anything for that kind of unemployment rate; black male college grads last year had an unemployment rate of 7.8 percent, and for blacks as a whole it was a whopping 16 percent. (Notice, too, that the subhead assumes manhood is white.) A search of the Nexis database turns up no Newsweek cover stories on the epidemic of black male unemployment in the last five years.

I would also point out to Newsweek that single white men have a median wealth of nearly $44,000, and married white households have a median wealth of $167,500.  Black married households, by comparison, stand at $31,500, single black men at $7,900, and single black women at $100 (Extra!, 6/10).  When their Beached White Males lose their jobs, they have much more of a safety net to fall back on than pretty much any other demographic. No doubt Newsweek is at least vaguely aware of this--though they're probably more acutely aware that Beached White Males and their employed counterparts also have more money to waste on magazines that feed into their anxieties.

The Sunday New York Times (4/17/11) ran a big front-page piece on John Tanton, founder of the anti-immigration organizations Federation for American Immigration Reform and Center for Immigration Studies. I guess it's positive that someone in corporate media is finally paying attention to Tanton's racism (long documented here at FAIR--1/1/93--and by groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center--Winter/08), and reporter Jason DeParle does include a good deal of damning information about Tanton and some of his own racist words.

But he also manages to interview almost exclusively people currently or formerly affiliated with Tanton's groups (six of these people in all) plus a few GOP officials--none of whom have anything bad to say about the Federation, CIS or Numbers USA (another Tanton-connected group), even if they're mildly critical of Tanton himself. A single critic is quoted, Frank Sharry of the progressive immigration reform group America's Voice. The result is that the piece essentially portrays Tanton as the only problem with these anti-immigrant groups, and though they won't kick him off their boards, THEY'RE not actually racist themselves--they just roll their eyes at their racist founder and tolerate his eccentricities.

DeParle explained the trouble with critics of the groups:

Accusations of bigotry could alienate moderates the immigrant rights groups need. Allies of Dr. Tanton say their accusers are discrediting themselves with a guilt-by-association campaign that twists his ideas and projects them onto groups where, they say, his influence long ago waned.

The idea is attributed to allies of Tanton, but that's the basic framing of the entire piece. If critics were given more space, they might have been able to point out that it's not just a Tanton problem--although the fact that he remains on the board of the Federation ought to be plenty damning in itself. As the SPLC documents (3/16/10), the racism at the Federation and CIS extends far beyond Tanton, permeating the board, staff and programming. Mark Krikorian, executive director of CIS, wrote in the National Review Online (1/21/10) that

Haiti's so screwed up because it wasn’t colonized long enough.... Unlike Jamaicans and Bajans and Guadeloupeans, et al., after experiencing the worst of tropical colonial slavery, the Haitians didn’t stick around long enough to benefit from it. (Haiti became independent in 1804.). And by benefit I mean develop a local culture significantly shaped by the more-advanced civilization of the colonizers.

Dan Stein, president of the Federation, was asked by Tucker Carlson (Wall Street Journal, 10/2/97) to respond to a quote from another Federation board member, eugenicist Garrett Hardin, who had warned that "breeders" were reproducing uncontrollably "in Third World countries," and that the "less intelligent" should be discouraged from "breeding." Stein's response: "Yeah, so what? What is your problem with that? Should we be subsidizing people with low IQs to have as many children as possible, and not subsidizing those with high ones?"

Rachel Maddow (MSNBC, 4/29/10) recently confronted Stein with this quote and other evidence of racism at the Federation compiled by the SPLC. Stein claimed that all of the SPLC's factual allegations about his group were wrong. The next night (4/30/10), Maddow factchecked Stein's claims, demonstrating that he, in Maddow's words, "was flat-out, totally shamelessly uncomplicatedly lying."

That's the kind of reporting that needs to be done on Stein and his colleagues.

This Saturday I'll be on a panel at Left Forum titled "Racism and Resistance in the Immigration Debate," with former FAIR communications director Isabel Macdonald, Monica Novoa of Drop the I-Word, Sonia Guinansaca of the New York State Youth Leadership Council and Esther Kaplan of the Nation Institute, moderated by my former Paper Tiger colleague Denisse Andrade.

Below is the description. I'll be talking about my recent article, "Time to 'Drop and Leave' Loaded Language," among other things. If you're in the New York area, stop by for what should be a very interesting conversation.

Racist, dehumanizing terms such as "illegal" play a crucial role in generating and reinforcing racial animus toward immigrants. This harmful and colonizing language, which is too often granted an unchallenged platform in the media, underpins policies that violate human rights, and hurt immigrants and all communities of color. On this panel, media activists, organizers and journalists discuss strategies of resistance and reflect on the lessons of their own work at the front-lines of the immigration debate. From the movement of "Dreamers"--the immigrant youth who have "come out as undocumented, unafraid and unapologetic" in the media, especially during the Dream Act campaign; to the Nation's expose of immigrant-bashing former CNN host Lou Dobbs’s reliance on undocumented labor; to a new campaign calling on journalists to "drop the I-word" (illegal) in their coverage of immigrants.

While defending Rep. Peter King's (R.-N.Y.) congressional hearings on domestic Muslim extremism, Bill O'Reilly (3/9/11) scoffed at the notion that the biggest domestic terror threats in the U.S. come from the "radical right" and not from homegrown Muslims. After playing a clip of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Mark Potok making that argument, O'Reilly responded:

Are you kidding me? The radical right? The last terror act assigned to them was the Oklahoma City Bombing in 1995.

In reality, acts of political violence connected to the far right are a regular occurrence. To make his claim, O'Reilly even had to overlook at least two domestic terror acts apparently inspired by his Fox News colleague Glenn Beck.

In July 2010 Beck devotee Byron Williams shot two California Highway Patrol officers when they stopped him on his way, as he later told police, to kill people at the Oakland California offices of the progressive Tides Foundation and the ACLU. Byron cited Beck, who journalist John Hamilton pointed out had aired anti-Tides commentaries on 29 separate editions of his Fox News show, as an inspiration.

Furthermore, the ADL reported that Pittsburgh's Richard Poplawski--who was arrested after a shootout with police that left three officers dead--was so inspired by Beck's anti-government conspiracy theories he posted to a neo-Nazi website tape of Beck suggesting the government was building concentration camps for dissidents.

And how could O'Reilly forget Jim Adkisson, who shot and killed two people at a progressive Tennessee church in 2008? In his "manifesto," Adkisson wrote that he "wanted to kill…every Democrat in the Senate & House, the 100 people in Bernard Goldberg's book." (These days, Adkisson inspiration Bernard Goldberg is best known for his regular appearances on the O'Reilly Factor.)

But there's more. What about anti-abortion terrorist Eric Rudolph, who killed two and injured scores in bombings carried out between 1996 and 1998, including attacks at women's health clinics and the 1996 Atlanta Olympics?

And far-right racist and anti-Semite James von Brunn, who took a rifle to the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. in June 2009, shooting  to death a security guard before he was stopped by police?

Perhaps O'Reilly doesn't consider Scott Roeder, the anti-abortion activist who murdered women's health provider Dr. George Tiller, a terrorist. After all, before his May 2009 murder, O'Reilly and his guests had demonized Tiller in 27 separate editions of his show, with the host dubbing Tiller a "killer" and accusing him of "Nazi stuff."

On January 17, city workers in Spokane, Washington, found a sophisticated bomb set to go off along the route of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Day march. Of course, there's a chance O'Reilly hasn't heard about this; the single mention O'Reilly's network has made of the crime was in a 100-word rip-and-read (Special Report, 1/18/11) the day after the march.

Then there's also the possibility that O'Reilly and his colleagues just don't care about right-wing domestic terrorism--especially when the news might undermine Muslim-bashing congressional hearings they do care about. On Wednesday, the day before King's congressional witch hunt began, federal officials arrested white supremacist Kevin William Harpham for  attempting to use a "weapon of mass destruction" in the Spokane terror crime. To this point, the arrest has not been mentioned on Fox News.

Today the New York Times reports that an arrest has been made in connection with an attempted bombing at the Martin Luther King Day parade in Spokane, Washington. As we pointed out here, the case has generated relatively little media coverage--in contrast to attempted domestic terrorism attacks (or even alleged plots) connected to Muslims.

The suspect is Kevin Harpham--as the Times points out, he is linked to a white supremacist group:

Law enforcement officials would not say whether Mr. Harpham had links to extremist groups. But the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks such groups, said that its research showed that Mr. Harpham was a member of the National Alliance as recently as 2004.

The Times story appears on page A20.